Wii U will connect to social networking sites such as Facebook, it has been announced.

Nintendo president Satoru Iwata told investors that the Wii U will not fall behind in online services, where Nintendo systems have been weak in the past.

"After examining the penetration and adoption rate of social networking services like Facebook, etc., we've come to the conclusion that we are no longer in a period where we cannot have any connection at all with social networking services," Iwata said.

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"Rather, I think we've come to an era where it's important to consider how the social graph of the social networking services can work in conjunction with something like a video game platform."

For the Wii U's core online infrastructure, Nintendo hopes to make the system flexible to developers' needs.

"I think that, going forward, the question is really to what degree Nintendo can create a more flexible system for its consoles," Iwata continued.

"What we found at this point is that, as we discuss the online structure with different publishers, the things that the different publishers want to do are in fact seemingly rather different. Our current direction is how we can take the desires of the third parties and create a system that's flexible enough to enable them to do the types of things that they might want to do."

Sony's more flexible online infrastructure currently allows for services such as Steam integration on the PlayStation 3. A flexible online policy for the Wii U could please publishers like EA, Ubisoft and Activision that have attempted in the past to launch their own services through consoles with limited success.